Dec

20

I went away for a conference. Sort of.

Filed Under Articles, Collaboration, General 

I spent much of a two week period in October at a conference all about using computers in the classroom. I went to about six different presentations, hearing speakers from all over the world. The cool part is that I never boarded a plane, I never left town, and, in order to do this, I never even left the school where I work.

The K-12 Online Conference was held entirely on the Internet. This was the first time I’ve ever been to a conference like this, and it left me thinking. The format has enormous power, but there are problems, too.

Inexpensive: It didn’t cost me anything to go to this conference. Of course, it did cost money for the organizers. They had to pay for web space to post the presentations, and bandwidth used when everything was downloaded. Yet to fly in one speaker and put him in a hotel for a few nights is hundreds, if not thousands of dollars. You can have an awful lot of people download a presentation for the cost of bringing in one live speaker. If they’d actually had to fly in the more than a dozen presenters who were part of the conference the costs would have been enormous.

Accessible: Thousands of folks from all over the world were able to “go” to this conference. Presenters from right here in Manitoba, over in Alberta, and all over the U.S.A. were able to make it to the conference without ever leaving home. This meeting brought ideas to people who would never normally have been able to hear them

Ready when you are: I’m a dad and a full time teacher. I don’t have the option of going away to a conference for a few days, let alone two weeks. I don’t have that kind of time. I was able to download the presentations when I had time and listen to them on my MP3 player whenever I was ready. That’s convenience.

Personalized: Presenters were able to personalize their presentations in ways that can’t be done face-to-face. Some of the presentations were done in multiple locations as the speakers tried to illustrate different points by videoing themselves outdoors and, later on, in a classroom. The presentations weren’t confined to a lecture hall or a dusty church basement. They could be wherever the speaker could bring his laptop computer. He was limited only by his imagination.

This is only the second time this particular online conference has run, so the opportunity to personalize presentations was not used nearly as well as it might have been. Not all speakers left you sitting on the edge of your seat, but there is a potential there that doesn’t exist with live presentations.

Impersonal: I never met a single person who was at the conference. Make no mistake, I’m a huge fan of Internet collaboration. Over the Internet, I’ve gotten all kind of help with classroom projects from teachers I’ve never me. These people have been an enormous help to me and are collectively a resource that I never would have had access to if I could only have talked to them in person. Yet you do lose something when you can’t talk about the speech with the person who was sitting next to you. It’s fun to have coffee (or tea) with some of the others who heard the same speaker and see if they reacted the same way.

While there were online discussion areas, and places to leave comments for the presenters, somehow that’s just not the same as being there live. It’s the difference between listening to a CD or going to a concert. One is good, the other is better.

The speakers, too, could have benefited from having a live audience. A good teacher, minister, or public speaker watches his audience to see if they’re interested in what he’s saying and changes what he says and how he says it in order to keep his audience engaged. Never seeing their audience, the conference speakers didn’t have this opportunity. Consequently, their material while uniformly interesting, was sometimes a little awkward and clunky in the delivery.

Do-able: The main thing that I fascinated me about these presentations was how easy and inexpensive it would be to duplicate this conference in a different setting. The software you need is cheap or free. The hardware, aside from a computer, consists of a ten dollar mike and a twenty dollar webcam. The hosting, if you were inventive, could be free if you used YouTube or a site like that.

It has potential for Christian churches and educators. In October a local church brought in a speaker from New York to talk about evangelism. He was heard by hundreds of people here in town. He could have stayed home and been heard by those hundreds and thousands more if they had broadcast his message over the Internet.

A group of Reformed Christian principals gathered recently in Washington state. They came from around the world. For the dozens of people who attended and paid conference fees and travel costs, the conference cost them many thousands of dollars in total. Had the convention been held on the Internet, it might have cost only hundreds and could have brought in speakers from around the world. While they would have missed the face-to-face contact, they could’ve benefited from a wider range of speakers and a lower cost.

Churches and independent schools need contact with experts and thinkers outside of their immediate community. Often they don’t get the number of speakers they want, or the quality of presenters they desire because of monetary and distance limitations. This presentation format, while it’s not perfect, could sure help overcome some of those issues.

This was originally published in Reformed Perspective.

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